Outsource Software
Challenges in Offshore Software Development
In this day and age, with globalization setting in, organizations are constantly looking for benefits derived from outsourcing software development to other countries. There is skilled software teams distributed all over the world, which are increasingly being made available to organizations as partner companies, collaborating on offshore software development projects.
Organizations have been distributing their work all over the world, outsourcing their software development projects to different countries. The motivations of these organizations, as well as the process they follow in distributing projects, continues to evolve. There have been significant management process changes adopted by companies in dealing with offshore companies and their software teams.
Offshore software development offers several benefits, but at the same time distribution of projects to distributed team of software engineers offer more challenges than the collected team. The question is how to address these issues, and as these evolve, there would be finally a set of critical factors that would ensure the success of offshore software development.
The trends in the market:
There is a continued global expansion of companies, and this expansion has resulted in distribution of their teams around the world in several ways, whether be it offshoring, acquiring, partnering, or outsourcing. As this practice becomes prevalent, there is a constant evolvement of approaches and practices, taking the offshoring to a matured level.
The decision factor:
Many organizations are moving their work to one single destination, and frequently in India. In the present days there are trends in transferring projects to China, and the Eastern European countries. In transferring the work, the main motive was the cost factor, where the decision to move offshore was influenced mainly by the availability of the skill at a much cheaper rate than the US or Western European countries.
Organizations in the US and Western Europe are increasingly setting up their own development centres in several locations in the world. The decision to set up such center in Asia, and Eastern European countries are mostly motivated by the availability of the right skill at low rates, and there are other motivation factors which has prompted organizations to move offshore.
Having centers all over the world, organizations now have a pool of talents from which they can draw from. Having set up the teams in different time zones, the organizations can now have extended working hours. The team in the eastern zone hands over the job to the western team at the end of their day. The team in the western region starts to work on the same project, there-by extending the time extensively, saving cost and time of completion.
There is increasing number of outsourcing providers growing in the world, which has made outsourcing popular for quite some time. Initially, the organizations used to select outsourcing vendors who made sense at that time. The decision could also have also have been based on the project itself, which was perhaps found to be suitable for outsourcing, or the organizations might have based their decision on such projects which were short of funding.
The pitfalls:
In order to successfully accomplish project completion, the offshore companies need to be flexible in adapting to new methodologies, life-cycles, and specifications in order to meet the outsourced project requirements. In each case, the methodology applied for projects are usually different. There are other factors which may affect the offshore software development processes, and these could be the existing communication and co-ordination variables, cultural differences, requirement deficiencies, relationship management, quality process, project management tools for project evaluation, and more importantly the turn-over of skilled people attached to the project.
